Search engines are commonly used to search the large volume of content items that are available on computer networks, such as the World Wide Web, thereby enabling users to locate content items of interest. A typical search engine is capable of accessing web pages, hypertext documents, images, video, audio, and other content items from the Internet or other network that may be responsive to a search that a given user is executing.
To use a given search engine, a user of a client device typically navigates to the search engine and enters one or more search terms or keywords, e.g., a search query. On the basis of the search query, the search engine identifies one or more content items that are responsive to the one or more search terms or keywords comprising the search query. The content items identified by the search engine form a result set that is displayed to the user issuing the query.
A search engine may rank the content items that are responsive to a given query according to relevance, e.g., a list or other type of arrangement that allows a user of the search engine to easily ascertain those results that are more likely to be relevant to the search query. For example, a search engine may determine that a first given content item that is responsive to a given query is more relevant than a second given content item that is responsive to the query. Accordingly, the search engine may place the first content item in a more prominent position in a result set of responsive content items, such as at the top of a list of ranked content items, in comparison to the position at which the search engine places the second content item.
Queries that users of a search engine frequently generate may have a plurality of relevant content items that the search engine may identify as responsive to such queries. For example, the query “NFL Football” a given user provides may result in a plurality of web sites providing football statistics, scores, game schedules, etc. In contrast, queries that users of a search engine generate less frequently may have few, if any, items of content that a search engine identifies as responsive to such queries. For example, a given user may generate a query for information regarding an actor that plays a role in only a single movie that is not widely known. A search engine may identify very few, if any, web sites containing information responsive to the user's query, indicating that additional content responsive to the query may be necessary. Similarly, although a search engine may identify a plurality of web sites responsive to the user's query, such sites may not contain highly relevant or responsive content, indicating the search engine's inaccuracy in identifying responsive content.
Identification of queries with few, if any, responsive content items or content items identified as responsive to a given query that contain little, if any, actual responsive information may be used to determine queries for which additional content is necessary. Similarly, identification of queries with few responsive content items or a plurality of irrelevant content items may be used by search engines to increase the likelihood of retrieving content items that are highly responsive to such queries. While current techniques exist for the identification of content responsive to queries, there exists a need to identify queries for which supplemental content is necessary, such queries referred to herein as needy queries.